essed it in return. The Woman in her
thrilled to the Man in him.

Cudgee, on the hind seat with his back to them, broke the spell.

'My word, Massa! You look out, Mithsis--big feller goanner sit down
along a tree.' And for the first time in her existence, Lady Bridget
beheld a monster iguana dragging its huge lizard tail and turning its
stately, brown crocodile head round at her from the safe vantage place
of a thick gum branch.

After that, the way led off the main road, on by a less used track
through wilder country. Here Wombo, the black boy, was
waiting--Moongarr Bill having gone on with the pack horse to the
camping place--and helped to unharness the two leaders which he drove
before him ahead. The trees thickened, the buggy wheels caught on
stumps. Cudgee had to get down at intervals and, with his axe, lop and
clear fallen timber. Every mile the progress grew slower and the forest
more lonely. No sign now of a selector's clearing, or of any human
occupation.... But there was a pack of emus hustling and shaking their
big bunches of feathers like startled ballet girls.

'I feel as if part of the Zoo had been let loose,' said Lady Bridget
when again there bounded along in the near distance a pair of kangaroos
with a little Joey kangaroo taking a lesson in locomotion behind its
parents.

They were still in the gum forest, but now and then came a belt of
gidia scrub--mournful trees with stiff black trunks and grey green
foliage and a pale sort of wattle flower smelling like dead cattle when
rain is about, as McKeith explained. But there was no rain about now,
and, in truth, he would have welcomed the unpleasant odour. Perhaps it
was that which made the ground so stark and bare beneath these trees
where no grass will grow. The sun was lowering when they left the
gidia. Out in the gum forest again, the birds were chattering before
retiring to rest. All life is still in the bush at mid-day, but now
there were curious scutterings among the grass tussocks, and the whirr
of its insect population sounded all round. The country got
prettier--swelling pastures and stony pinches and a distant outline of
hills. They could see the green line of a water course.

'Plenty water sit down along a creek?' McKeith asked the black boy. But
Cudgee shook his woolly head.

'Ba'al* mine think it, Massa. No rain plenty long time.'

[*ba'al--the Aboriginal negative.]

McKeith sighed. The dark shadow of coming drought is a fearsome sp